4
Vaudeville Acts

When Tokugawa Ieyasu entered Tokyo, then known as Edo, in 1590, the place was composed of a fortress and some desolate communities. In twenty years it was transformed into such a lively city that a shipwrecked former governor of the Philippines, Don Rodrigo de Vivero, praised its city planning and wrote that although in exterior appearance houses in Spain were more beautiful, the interiors of the Japanese houses were superior in beauty.⁴⁶ Edo then had a population of about 150,000, and in the following hundred years the population grew to more than one million, surpassing London (870,000), Paris (540,000), Vienna (250,000), Moscow (also 250,000) and Berlin (170,000). From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Edo was the largest city in the world outside China.

Half of the city’s population were samurai who gathered together from different regions of the country, and officials and guards of the central government. The other half were mostly merchants and artisans. There were few farmers in the city area. Since 1794, following the policy of Matsudaira Sadanobu, an emergency rice stock had been accumulated, which could feed half a million merchants and artisans for half a year. There was a relatively free labour market and also social security for citizens living in Edo.

Terakado Seiken’s The Prosperity of Edo (1832) records a conversation in the alleys. A mendicant comes home at noon and tells a nun that because of the current inflation he had not been given much rice. He says that thanks to the rice storage they would not starve, but should try to save and economize in case of emergency. Overhearing this conversation, a neighbour shouts from beyond the wall, ‘Stop such gloomy talk. When Nakamura Shikan, the star kabuki actor, left Edo for Osaka, the patrons sent him one hundred ry in one night, and one thousand ry in ten days, didn’t they? Even if we have to eat porridge at home, we give generously to the actor we patronize. That is the spirit of the Edo citizen for you.’

This conversation coming from poor citizens who depended on aid from the emergency rice store sounds reckless, and it is reckless. It indicates the mentality of the working classes in Edo at that time. Their occupation might have been a poor one but they still took pride in patronizing a kabuki actor or a vaudeville storyteller. Fashions were set by the working class, not by aristocratic samurai or wealthy merchants. That was the spirit of Edo.⁴⁷

News and opinions were exchanged in the public bath houses and the barber shops, of which Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822) has left vivid records in Ukiyo Buro (1809) and Ukiyo Doko (1813).

An urban sociologist, Isomura Eiichi, has defined the community unit in Edo as the area within which a shout can be heard. Edo was divided into such community units, each of which had a chieftain. Houses were made of wood, bamboo, paper and mortar, quite vulnerable to fire, and they were very small. Streets, accordingly, became a very important part of living quarters, especially in summertime. In particular, streets were the place for children to play and amuse themselves in all seasons. The Japanese are known not to scold their children severely as is done in Europe and the U.S.A. E.S.Morse, who came to Japan in the early Meiji Period and introduced Darwinism and anthropology to Japan, was impressed with this fact, and wondered why Japanese children remained so obedient in spite of this.⁴⁸ The reason was an aspect of social life which he overlooked, that is, the self-regulating system which operated among children on the streets in each of the neighbourhood units. Elder sisters and brothers took care of younger members of their families, which tended to be very large, and within the street community elder boys took care of the younger boys and the older girls of the younger girls.

This structure of the city has undergone a transformation. The economic growth of the 1960s has transformed the city’s structure and has created serious educational problems. Children no longer have access to small streets and have no free time to associate with one another. They are occupied at tutoring schools after school and are directly controlled by their mothers since families are now small.

Another Western observer of the early Meiji era was impressed by the behaviour of a maid who, when instructed to buy a mackerel, bought a cheaper fish which she said, looked fresher. The observer was surprised by the maid’s independence in making a decision,⁴⁹ but this, also, was not surprising in view of the fact that maids served in middle-class families for only a brief period in order to learn the art of housekeeping before they became housewives. This custom became popular in the middle of the Tokugawa Period, around the time of Kyho (1715–1735). The relationship was similar to that between artisans and their apprentices, who expected to become independent artisans after a certain period.

The sense of a common culture shared by both lower and upper classes became prevalent from around that time. This is reflected in the fact that many samurai who rose in the post-Meiji era to the rank of marquis or prince and became elder statesmen married courtesans and prostitutes and appeared on public occasions with their wives. Examples are Prince It, many times the premier of Japan, Prince Yamagata, also many times Premier, and Chief of Staff of the army, Marquis Inoue, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Count Yamamoto, twice Premier and many times Minister of the Navy. Such a practice was uncommon in Europe and the U.S.A., China, India, Korea and other Asian countries, and could not have existed without this sense of sharing a common culture. These elder statesmen had themselves undergone an apprenticeship, learning menial jobs. Sir Ernest Satow recounts in his memoirs his landing, in 1864, in Chsh fief, after the war between Britain and Chsh. He was served an impromptu European meal prepared by the Japanese under the direction of It, who procured the materials from war-torn towns and somehow produced recognizably European food.⁵⁰ Such skill as a servant and cook must have been rare in a nineteenth-century prime minister. Japan’s rise as a modern state could be credited to such men.

Kat Shichi (1919–) has described the salient characteristic of modern Japanese culture as the sharing by everybody of common reading material. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the president of a company and the janitor would both read the magazine King, which sold a million copies. In the 1950s and 1960s, both would read the Asahi Weekly or the Weekly Post. In the 1970s, both would watch the same NHK Great River Dramas on television every Sunday. This would not be the case in Britain, France or the U.S.A.

The continuing stream of this common culture is a basic reason why more than 90 per cent of Japanese today label themselves as middle class. Standards of living, measured in terms of automobiles, washing machines and colour televisions, cannot alone account for this all-pervading middle-class consciousness since the 1960s. It has its roots in mid-Tokugawa city culture, and, if we trace it further back, in the self-containment of Japan for the last thousand years.

Despite this there does exist a clearly distinguished elite. The line of demarcation does not directly correspond with wealth or class. The elite consists of graduates of the law department of Tokyo University, who tend to obtain key positions in government and industrial management. The farmers well know that they have no equipment to retain the newly given wealth. The realization of their precarious position lay behind the farmers’ resistance to the enlargement of the U.S. military base in Tachikawa and the Sanrizuka farmers’ resistance against the establishment of an international airport in Narita. Millions of yen would not guarantee a stable livelihood for those who did not have the training and information to make their capital profitable. An enormous amount of cash would dwindle in no time.

The ruling elite also participates in the common culture. Its members, however, are able to manipulate words and ideas imported from more advanced cultures outside Japan as well as the best information gathered by the network of the bureaucracy at their command. The contrast between this elite and the masses has been a long-standing theme in the cultural history of Japan. This theme is reflected in the development of a form of vaudeville amusement called manzai, or the dialogue between the Master and the Servant.

According to the folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953), linguistic arts in Japan have their origin in banquet amusements.⁵¹ The stunts performed at banquets are preserved in modern festival dances at local shrines. In these stunts the principal role is that of a guest of honour, a visitor to the house and also to the locality. A local spirit appears and tries clumsily to imitate whatever the guest says, and through this clumsy mimicry resists and contradicts the message of the main guest, which must be obeyed. The performance, however, ends with his capitulation. He becomes silent. The play ends with the wry grimace of the local spirit. This play has special masks, the guest god’s being that of an honourable old man (Okina) and the resisting local spirit’s a grimacing face (Beshimi), later transformed into the funny face called Hyottoko.

This play took on a fixed form in the time of the establishment of central government in Japan. Officials sent from the central government to local posts gave orders written in Chinese and modelled on Chinese documents. Local people could not properly imitate these or reply in the official language. They obeyed, nevertheless, but with some feeling of grievance and remonstrance. Japan’s situation on the periphery of the great universal civilization of China and the sense of inferiority and the need to learn the more advanced ways of a superior civilization have long been a point of common understanding among its people. Even so, the officials who governed local areas by means of an imported official language could not meet the needs of local people. This pattern of representing the political situation has not been outgrown even today.

The banquet entertainment produced specialized performers assuming fixed roles. They came to be called the ‘Tay’, who played the role of a master, and the ‘Saiz’, who played the role of the nitwit servant. At wine brewings they would enact the emergence of good wine, and at the completion of a new house they would enact the emergence of a beautiful and solid house. At New Year they would go to the Emperor’s palace, and enact the good events that were to take place that year. From the palace they would go to other houses and repeat their performance. In the Meigetsuki of Fujiwara Sadaie, it is recorded in the entry for the sixteenth day of the eleventh month of the year 1200 that a manzai came and performed an auspicious greeting.⁵² They came from the outcasts and were given special protection by their affiliation with the temples. They did not intermarry with other sections of society. The groups in these quarters came to specialize in

11 Manzai performers in the Sensh Scroll, Poetry Contest of the Thirty-two Artisans

sending out manzai couples. As many households wanted such feliciations at New Year, the specialist quarters sent manzai performers all around the country to make their annual rounds at the beginning of the year. At other times of the year the performers worked as farmers in their own villages.⁵³

The heart of the performance was a simple dialogue between the serious character and the nitwit. As time went on, it attracted and assimilated new techniques from other forms of amusement. Especially after the Russo-Japanese War, the age-old custom of the summer dance festival gave a new stimulus to the growth of manzai.⁵⁴ In summer villages hold communal dance parties; the whole village dances in a ring, and a certain amount of sexual licence is allowed on that night. The master of ceremonies stands on a specially erected tower in the centre of the ring and encourages the dancers, making jokes directed at the villagers. This art of extemporaneous wit was introduced to small vaudeville theatres in the cities of Osaka and Kbe, which were expanding

12 Mikawa manzai in the closing years of the Edo Period (Tay on the right, Saiz on the left)

rapidly with the sudden industrialization of Japan. People who in their youth had failed at higher professions such as kabuki actors, soldiers, dentists, officials and bank clerks, or later, bus drivers, movie actors, hairdressers and stewardesses, turned to the lowly beggar’s art of manzai. With such backgrounds, they introduced mimicries of these professions. Through such autobiographical fragments, they reflected Japanese society at large from the periphery, never falling into the middle-class smugness towards which Japanese society had an innate inclination. In this, the modern manzai preserves something of its ancient and medieval character, true to its origin in social stratification.

A curious aspect of the art of manzai is that the performance was never a drama. In manzai, the performers were always themselves, and they told whatever they wanted to tell as something they had experienced (even if the experiences were invented). In

13 Vaudeville scene in the late Edo Period

this, manzai differs from the rakugo, the art of telling droll stories, another vaudeville art fostered in the Edo Period. In rakugo the stories are presented as tales, not as something that has happened to the teller himself. And as the art of storytelling gained social status in the age of television, all the noted Rakugo specialists came to enjoy a high standard of living, which cut them off from the materials which made up the stuff of their stories such as public bathing houses and communal barracks with shared toilets. An exception was Kokontei Shinsh (1890–1973), who continued to visit the public bathing house, carried on a young man’s shoulders, believing that his art would wither if cut off from the roots of his stories.

Manzai performers could not follow the same development as rakugo performers because of the nature of their art. When many film actors, novelists, singers and television talents went into politics and were elected members of the Upper House, four manzai performers also became M.P.s. But none of these manzai M.P.s entered the ruling Conservative Party. They stayed in parliament as independent critics. This indicates something of the character of manzai.

14 Vaudeville scene in the early Meiji Period

At the beginning of the Taish era, in 1912, Yoshimoto Taiz, a kitchen-ware dealer in Osaka, went bankrupt because he had neglected his business to frequent vaudeville theatres and patronize the performers. He began a new business, building a chain of vaudeville theatres. His wife and his wife’s younger brother were talented in management, and in a few years the family had succeeded in a new enterprise of managing talent for vaudeville theatres as well as establishing a chain of small vaudeville theatres all over Osaka. Later this Yoshimoto company came to own a chain of vaudeville theatres in most of the major cities in Japan. Through Yoshimoto’s efforts, the small vaudeville theatres born of community life in the city of Edo survived the age of industrial ization. The middle Edo Period had something of the character of mass culture. It was now inherited by the mass culture of the industrial age, blossoming in the Taish Period.

The Yoshimoto Enterprise under the direction of Yoshimoto Taiz, concentrated on acquiring rakugo performers. After her husband’s death, Taiz’s wife, Yoshimoto Sei, took over and made the highlight of the city show the farm girls’ dance about catching mudfish (yasukibushi). In the Shwa Period from 1926, Yoshimoto Sei’s younger brother, Hayashi Shnosuke, decided to make manzai the centre of the vaudeville acts. In 1925 radio broadcasting began in Japan, which helped the swift growth of manzai.

At the time, the sociologist Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969) warned that the development of mass communication like movies, photographic magazines, gramophone records and radio, would bring about a decline also in live arts such as singing and festival dancing in villages and towns, and would in the long run result in the decline of the original (not reproduction) arts, Yoshimoto’s programme of preserving small theatres and sending manzai performers all over Japan was an effort to counteract the lethargy brought about by the swift development of mechanized forms of communication.

Up to this time, manzai performers had learned their techniques through an apprenticeship to veteran manzai couples, and jokes were extemporaneous. After 1933, however, two men, Akita Minoru (1905–1977) and Nagaoki Makoto (1904–1976), compiled a catalogue of jokes which could be used as fragments of manzai dialogue.⁵⁵ In 1931, the Mukden Incident, then known in Japan as the Manchurian Incident, took place, marking the beginning of the Fifteen Years’ War. In 1933, due to the pressure of popular sentiment as a reaction to the fighting, the group tenk (apostasy) of the Communist leaders was made public. The result was a mass defection of the rank and file of the leftist movement. Akita and Nagaoki were students of Tokyo University and participants of the leftist movement. They shared a room in a student boarding house, and printed leaflets which they distributed in factories. Akita worked as an organizer of the outlawed leftist Japan Metal Workers Union, under the leadership of Zenky (the National Council of Labour Unions of Japan). As he could not publish direct criticism of contemporary social trends, Akita began to write humorous dialogues for publication in commercial magazines. An Asahi newspaper reporter then introduced Akita to a manzai couple, Yokoyama Entatsu (1896–1971) and Hanabishi Achako (1897–1974), who performed a new type of manzai dialogue based upon direct observation of contemporary events. This meeting prepared the way for Akita to become the mastermind of the manzai trade for nearly half a century. For some time a sale would be held after vaudeville shows of jokes written by Akita for manzai couples. Akita recorded a vast

15 Manzai team Hanabishi Achako (left) and Yokoyama Entatsu (right)

number of jokes, classified according to form and theme. Part of them were published recently. They consist of little jokes like this:

Conservation between a lady passenger and the captain of a ship:

Lady passenger: I’m afraid of getting seasick. What would you recommend as a meal?

Captain: Eat the cheapest dish on the menu.

This brings out into the open the very thing which the lady has tried to banish from her thoughts: vomiting.

Conversation between two children:

Elder brother: I’m frightened of war.

Little brother. Why are you frightened?

Elder brother: Because you are killed by the enemy.

Little brother: Then I’ll be the enemy.

This reveals an angle which the government tried to hide by controlling wartime opinion, with the co-operation of most scholars and writers of the time. Manzai, if left unrestricted, inevitably developed a critical viewpoint, at least hypothetically, and had therefore to be suppressed as the war continued, just as there was no room left for cartoons in the later stage of the war.

Akita and Nagaoki worked for Yoshimoto Enterprise but had little to do in the last part of the war. After the war, Nagaoki wrote a comic radio script, Good-natured Father, for Hanabishi Achako, which made him the most famous comedian in Japan in the 1950s. Achako’s programme began in 1952 and lasted for 14 years. By 1959, it had been listed as the most popular programme on the national network more than 200 times, and Nagaoki was awarded a Note of Thanks.

A contribution was made to the postwar development of manzai by two divorced couples, Miyako Chch and Nanto Yji and Ky Utako and tori Keisuke. Both of these held family counselling programmes on radio and television for many years in the manzai style. Before the war, the Japanese, obedient to government-enforced morality, were severe with divorced women. There has been a decisive change since the defeat. Miyako Chch and Nanto Yji, a manzai couple, began a marriage counselling show in which they talked with couples and added their own extemporaneous comments on the basis of their experience as an old

16 Miyako Chch (left) and Nanto Yji (right)

married couple. It was an innovative use of manzai and proved quite popular. After the programme had run for some time, the couple were divorced and Nanto Yji remarried. In prewar times, the programme would have been discontinued, but public opinion had undergone a change to which the broadcasting company directors were sensitive, and the programme continued after they disclosed their divorce. The public felt that a manzai couple who had been through a divorce and could still remain friends were better fitted to listen to the grievances of married life. Chch gained greater popularity, and Yji, her ex-husband, continued to

17 tori Keisuke (left) and Ky Utako (right)

play the part of the unworthy partner and to be a foil for his ex-wife.

Chch was illiterate, and before her the famous Wakana of the Wakana-Ichir couple had also been illiterate. Considering the high literacy in Japan since the Taish Period, the illiteracy of the two greatest female manzai stars reveals the position of manzai in the hierarchy of popular arts in Japan. Manzai has long been a popular art representing the uneducated class. To this class the leaders of the opposition parties, including the Communists, Socialists and the New Left, seem a shadow bureaucracy, closely resembling the ruling bureaucracy. Distrust of the leadership and the expression of the simple needs of the people have characterized manzai from ancient times to the present day.⁵⁶

In 1823 an English man of letters and dramatic critic, John Payne Collier, wrote Punch and Judy, in which he traced the lineage of Punch back to the devil of medieval religious drama, and through him further to characters in pre-Christian Greek mythology.⁵⁷ Since his introduction to England from Holland by William of Orange in 1688, Punch has for three hundred years been a symbol of the evil man, and the cheerful evil man at that, and has encouraged the English to distrust official proclamations, made from time to time, that all was well. Punch helped to preserve the idea that there existed cheerful evil men working evil, and to preserve a spirit critical of the general political situation.

In contrast to Punch, the manzai couple stood for the inarticulate wisdom of the ignorant which is again and again crushed by the articulate wisdom of officials, but nevertheless perseveres. It is like a genius loci asserting itself in spite of the yoke of universalization imposed for 2,000 years. During the Occupation, I heard the following manzai joke:

Man (boasting): ‘Inu’ is ‘dog’ in English.

Woman: My, you know English well.

Man: I had a university education. Of course I know.

Woman: What about ‘neko’ then?

Man: ‘Cat,’ It’s easy.

Woman: Really you are marvellous. What about cow?

Man: Eh, eh, cow is eh…‘Niik’ (niku means ‘meat’ in Japanese).

The man’s ignorance is revealed to the audience, and woman and man, facing the reality of their ignorance, promise each other to talk henceforth without pretence. This was produced at a time when Japanese who knew English had a higher social status. The audience is drawn into a fictitious world. Today men are trained to be and work like machines, and to acquire a machine-like accuracy. ‘The Manzai’ is a criticism of such machine-like skill as valued and practised by the ruling bureaucracy.⁵⁸

18 The Manzai performance by the Two Beats (Ts Biito): Biito Takeshi (left) and Biito Kiyoshi (right)